Money/Rampage

More inside details

3dfx was notorious for spending money. In the last year or so, roughly $30-50,000 was spent monthly on lunches. This did not include the additional snacks and drinks that were provided to employees. Hiring didn’t stop until the last few weeks, with all of us keeping hope that the company would pull through. Of course this did not happen.

Could 3dfx have lasted? Perhaps. They were offered a line of credit, but the board opted not to accept it as they would not accept the terms. Rumors within the company also circulated that an investor had expressed strong interest in the company, but backed out from a simple "goof" on the boards’ part (specifically, it was said to be their mention to the investor the possibility of a buyout by another company). But what would the future have held for 3dfx?

Next generation parts

Daytona- 3dfx's first low-end OEM part. Daytona was effectively a VSA-100 part with a DDR memory controller and a 64-bit memory bus. The idea was to deliver a cheaper version of the VSA-100, with the 64-bit bus making a notable dent in cost. Daytona simply could not be finalized though. It would tape out and a bug would be found, then tape out again and another bug would be found. Fortunately, a chip was not made between each tape out with the final number being A7 silicon. In the end, this resulted in considerable delays and final Daytona silicon never coming to life.

Rampage bringup

This is what you got when your socket isn't connecting well

Rampage (Spectre) - 3dfx's next high-end graphics part was capable of quad-chip support. Rampage silicon had come back from the fab just weeks before the announcement of 3dfx's demise. Sage, Rampage's geometry processor had recently taped out as well, so expectations were high. The first revision of Rampage silicon was able to achieve 200 MHz clock frequencies without active cooling. Originally, the expectation had been to ship it at 200 MHz, but with this capability, there was nothing limiting it from 250+ MHz clock speeds.

Screenshot of Quake 3 running on Rampage

Rocket fire

Of interesting note are the two bugs that did exist in Rampage silicon. The first was the DAC being flipped, reversing the color channels. It is hard to be certain how this bug managed to slip through, but it did. One possible reason it was not detected is because this was one of the few places on the chip that had not been simulated. The temporary fix was an interesting little board that was attached between the monitor cable and VGA connector. It flipped all the color channels, making it display correctly.

The second bug was an AGP issue that had initially caused some problems but was corrected for bring up boards by fibbing the chips.

One last shot of Quake 3 on Rampage

Here are the specs on Rampage, and its companion chip, Sage:

Rampage
200+ MHz Core
Approximately 30 million transistors
4 Pixel Pipelines
8 textures per-pass
DX 8 Pixel Shader 1.0
Quad-Chip support

Sage
50 million triangles/sec sustained
150 million triangles/sec real world
DX8 1.0 Vertex Shader
Approx. 20 million transistors